Oneida

The Oneida are a Native American tribe and one of the founding nations of the Iroquois confederacy of upstate New York. The Oneida inhabited central New York, particularly around what is now known as Oneida County and Oneida Lake, and its borders were defined in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix. During the American Revolutionary War, the Oneida, although initially remaining neutral, decided to side with their rebel neighbors against the British and four of the other six Iroquois tribes. A number of Oneida were baptized as Christians in the decade before the war, and many Oneida began to form stronger cultural links with the colonists. In 1777, they assisted the colonists in lifting the Siege of Fort Stanwix, but the minority of Oneida supporting the British grew as the colonists began to betray their Indian allies, including with their destruction of the Oneida settlement of Kanonwalohale. After the war, the Oneida were displaced by raids by settlers, and their lands were drastically reduced from 6 million acres to 32 acres. In the 1820s and 1830s, many of the remaining Oneida migrated to Wisconsin and to Canada, Today, there are 10,309 Oneida in the United States and 3,970 in Canada.